Libertarianism
State Infrastructure Fails --- 2nc Impact
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- ---Empirically the State’s iron fist on infrastructure have been disastrous
State Infrastructure Fails --- 2nc Impact---State based transportation infrastructure fails(a.) Not responsive to consumer demand --- State intervention externalizes transportation costs and eliminates the connection between consumer and producer resulting in inefficiency and policy failure.Carson 10 (Kevin, Senior fellow and holder of the Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory at the Center for a Stateless society, “The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies”, November 2010, http://www.thefreemanonline.org/features/the-distorting-effects-of-transportation-subsidies/) It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the dominant business model in the American economy, and the size of the prevailing corporate business unit, are direct results of such policies. A subsidy to any factor of production amounts to a subsidy of those firms whose business models rely most heavily on that factor, at the expense of those who depend on it the least. Subsidies to transportation, by keeping the cost of distribution artificially low, tend to lengthen supply and distribution chains. They make large corporations operating over wide market areas artificially competitive against smaller firms producing for local markets—not to mention big-box retailers with their warehouses-on-wheels distribution model. Some consequentialists treat this as a justification for transportation subsidies: Subsidies are good because they make possible mass-production industry and large-scale distribution, which are (it is claimed) inherently more efficient (because of those magically unlimited “economies of scale,” of course). Tibor Machan argued just the opposite in the February 1999 Freeman: Some people will say that stringent protection of rights [against eminent domain] would lead to small airports, at best, and many constraints on construction. Of course—but what’s so wrong with that? Perhaps the worst thing about modern industrial life has been the power of political authorities to grant special privileges to some enterprises to violate the rights of third parties whose permission would be too expensive to obtain. The need to obtain that permission would indeed seriously impede what most environmentalists see as rampant—indeed reckless—industrialization. The system of private property rights . . . is the greatest moderator of human aspirations. . . . In short, people may reach goals they aren’t able to reach with their own resources only by convincing others, through arguments and fair exchanges, to cooperate. In any case, the “efficiencies” resulting from subsidized centralization are entirely spurious. If the efficiencies of large-scale production were sufficient to compensate for increased distribution costs, it would not be necessary to shift a major portion of the latter to taxpayers to make the former profitable. If an economic activity is only profitable when a portion of the cost side of the ledger is concealed, and will not be undertaken when all costs are fully internalized by an economic actor, then it’s not really efficient. And when total distribution costs (including those currently shifted to the taxpayer) exceed mass-production industry’s ostensible savings in unit cost of production, the “efficiencies” of large-scale production are illusory. ---Hierarchical structure of state transportation policy results in preferential treatment disconnected from fair market competition that undermines solvency.Servodio, 04 (Paul, “Snowed by Road Statism”, Member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, 12/27/04, http://mises.org/daily/1704/) There is a slogan: "Everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it." It is especially true because so much of our transportation infrastructure is publicly owned. Every winter of bad weather brings us the same scenes of bleak road and highway conditions. Spinning tires, "beached" cars the shoulder of the road, cars stuck in the median and spun-out cars, impassable roads, banks of snow interfering with traffic flow, hazards of all sorts. The economic costs are high indeed. Northeast Ohio experienced its first significant snowfall of the fresh winter season. The snowstorm was quite a surprise; the weather reports did not indicate an oncoming snowstorm for the day. Nonetheless, the snow began falling at 11:00 a.m. and did not relent until sometime the next day. By 3:00 p.m. conditions had substantially worsened. The lake effect snow (The weather front moves across Lake Erie, picks up more moisture and dumps it on Cleveland.) became a force to reckon with on top of the gusting wind. The driving conditions were terrible; it was a white-out. My friend Ben and I were leaving downtown Cleveland after a day of job searching in Cleveland's financial district. As we came out of the parking garage we realized just how horrendous the drive home would be. City traffic was what one would expect it to be for rush hour, slow going. Interstate traffic was another story. It was not moving. What normally would be a 45 minute drive home turned into a 90 minute drive because of the atrocious conditions of Interstates 71 and 90. As time passed we did not see even one plow/salt truck. This prompted a discussion between my friend and I on how much better the roadways would be if they were privately owned. Obviously with privatized roads, the owners of these roads would have huge incentives to keep the roadways as clean as they possibly could during snowstorms. The profit incentives of being able to claim that one's roadway is much safer during inclement weather than a competitor's would be tremendous. Surely word of mouth would spread through consumers on which roadways were consistently safer to travel during inclement weather. The road owner who does nothing to keep his roadways clean during snowstorms would certainly suffer large profit losses. What seems to be the state's problem with keeping roadways clean of snow is that there simply are not enough plow/salt trucks to do all of the work. Isn't there a word for that scenario? What is it called? Ah yes, shortage! The state has a shortage of plow/salt trucks. The process works like this: all limited access highways are taken care of first, followed by primary city streets, and in a distant third are residential streets. I say a distant third because many of these streets do not get cleaned until the middle of the night or the next day. Some people have to wait until the sun gets around to being warm enough to melt the snow. Instead, road entrepreneurs would have their own teams of plow/salt trucks and know the precise number of these vehicles to have in order to efficiently keep their roadways clean of snow and ice. Some nonbelievers may think that privatized roads will never function as well as the current system of state owned roads. That it is impossible for the plow/salt trucks to operate efficiently to clean the roadways during rush hour because they are bogged down in traffic with the rest of the drivers. This is true; however, the market has already devised inventions to invalidate that assertion. As my friend mentioned, some bridges are currently being installed with a system that monitors road conditions for ice and snow. When weather conditions reach a certain threshold sprinkler heads pop up from the road and spray a non-corrosive agent onto the road to melt the snow and ice. Brilliant! The noncorrosive melting agent is currently used on select bridges in order to help keep the I-beams from rusting too quickly. Currently, the plow/salt trucks spread salt on the roadways as they drive along the road. When the salt interacts with the snow and ice it makes salt water, which then washes down over the I-beams, causing them to rust. This would be another selling point for the private road owner because his bridges would need less construction, meaning less traffic jams as a result of less construction. Where else would this noncorrosive melting agent be useful? I know, along the entire roadway, making those roads car-friendly as well. No more salt water washing up on cars causing premature corrosion. Every car owner who has to deal with these driving conditions knows that the salt water is harsh on the entire car, causing premature corrosion on the underbody, aluminum or chrome wheels and on the body. What a great way to attract consumers by not only having cleaner roadways, but also roadways that do not damage one's car. To be sure, the price to travel on a road that has an electronic monitoring system of road conditions and the noncorrosive melting agent would be a premium over other private roads that use the traditional method of salt to keep the road clean. However, it is entirely the consumer's decision in his willingness to pay for more safety and less corrosion versus a road that is less clean and uses corrosive agents to aid in snow and ice removal. Surely the road owners would always be seeking new methods to keep their roads as clean and safe as possible during snowstorms in the most efficient manner. Thus, other entrepreneurs would pursue avenues to meet the demands of road owners. Of course the state did not invent the noncorrosive melting agent, it was the free market motivated by the profit incentive. The state has no interest in improving driving conditions in the snow and ice because the state does not have to bother with such trivial aspects as profits and losses and competition in the way private firms do. Therefore, the state does not invest in ways to improve its capital. Besides, people are conditioned to driving on treacherous roads during snowstorms; they only wish the roads could be safer to travel. As Ben and I discussed this topic I began to realize why initially I did not think that the drive home would be so arduous. We were walking on the sidewalk to different office buildings. These buildings were not owned by the state, but rather by private firms. The owners of these buildings have an incentive to keep their walkways clear of snow and ice so that their customers do not slip, fall and break their bones or sustain a head injury. I noticed at one building there was a team of FIVE people shoveling snow and spreading salt over an area of approximately 1,000 square feet. That's probably the same number of plow/salt trucks operating to clean the city streets of Cleveland. In all honesty, the sidewalks were cleaner than the roadways! Unfortunately, the idea of private roadways is alien for most people; they are used to the hazardous roadways of the state. As shown though, the private market would provide safer road conditions and substantially less corrosive melting agents on the road. Therefore, it cannot be denied that privately owned roads are surely the solution to the unsafe, corrosive roads of the state because through the private sector consumers would have more choices in which roads to use instead of the current situation of the state's horrendous roads. ---View their solvency claims with skepticism --- Organizing transportation policy from a centralized epistemology is doomed to failure do to the inability of anyone party to access total market knowledge.Ross Kenyon ‘11 (serves on the Executive Board of Alumni For Liberty, on the Board of Directors of the Association of Libertarian Feminists, Center for Stateless Society, “But what about the roads?”, http://c4ss.org/market-anarchism-faq/but-what-about-the-roads) This is of those “gotcha!” questions that when asked libertarians are supposed to shrivel up and concede the point that in a free society we would all just lay in the mud and cry. Road provision needs to be addressed from several angles. The first point that needs to be brought up is that the central planning of transportation or anything else is inefficient due to what F.A. Hayek refers to as ‘the knowledge problem.‘ The individuals directly responsible and affected by projects should be the ones planning it, not a top-down and distant bureaucratic entity. The costs of acquiring all of the local information necessary to calculate such a complicated endeavor is insurmountable. People who invest in developing infrastructure should not be allowed to force everyone inside of an arbitrary geographical area (like the United States of America) to subsidize its construction and maintenance either. Why should you have to pay for a road you will never see in St. Augustine, Florida? A port in Galveston, Texas? The people who want such development should bear the full cost o their actions and allow consumers to support or not support their plans at the point of consumption (i.e. voting with one’s dollar). Kevin Carson and Noam Chomsky have both posited the extremely negative dislocating effects of state transportation infrastructure. By socializing the costs of the transportation of goods amongst all people, rather than amongst those who produce and consume the goods, there is far less of an incentive for consumers to consume locally. As a result, this series of policies artificially suppresses local industry and benefits distant producers. This is to some degree responsible for the unnatural centralization of major market players like Walmart, whom desperately needs the state to externalize the large costs of its goods’ transport. ---Empirically the State’s iron fist on infrastructure have been disastrousCarson 10 (Kevin, Senior fellow and holder of the Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory at the Center for a Stateless society, “The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies”, November 2010, http://www.thefreemanonline.org/features/the-distorting-effects-of-transportation-subsidies/) As new forms of transportation emerged, the government reprised its role, subsidizing both the national highway and civil aviation systems. From its beginning the American automotive industry formed a “complex” with the petroleum industry and government highway projects. The “most powerful pressure group in Washington” (as a PBS documentary called it) began in June 1932, when GM president Alfred P. Sloan created the National Highway Users Conference, inviting oil and rubber firms to help GM bankroll a propaganda and lobbying effort that continues to this day. Whatever the political motivation behind it, the economic effect of the interstate system should hardly be controversial. Virtually 100 percent of roadbed damage to highways is caused by heavy trucks. After repeated liberalization of maximum weight restrictions, far beyond the heaviest conceivable weight the interstate roadbeds were originally designed to support, fuel taxes fail miserably at capturing from big-rig operators the cost of pavement damage caused by higher axle loads. And truckers have been successful at scrapping weight-distance user charges in all but a few western states, where the push for repeal continues. So only about half the revenue of the highway trust fund comes from fees or fuel taxes on the trucking industry, and the rest is externalized on private automobiles. This doesn’t even count the 20 percent of highway funding that’s still subsidized by general revenues, or the role of eminent domain in lowering the transaction costs involved in building new highways or expanding existing ones. As for the civil aviation system, from the beginning it was a creature of the State. Its original physical infrastructure was built entirely with federal grants and tax-free municipal bonds. Professor Stephen Paul Dempsey of the University of Denver in 1992 estimated the replacement value of this infrastructure at $1 trillion. The federal government didn’t even start collecting user fees from airline passengers and freight shippers until 1971. Even with such user fees paid into the Airport and Airways Trust Fund, the system still required taxpayer subsidies of $3 billion to maintain the Federal Aviation Administration’s network of control towers, air traffic control centers, and tens of thousands of air traffic controllers. Eminent domain also remains central to the building of new airports and expansion of existing airports, as it does with highways. Subsidies to airport and air traffic control infrastructure are only part of the picture. Equally important was the direct role of the State in creating the heavy aircraft industry, whose jumbo jets revolutionized civil aviation after World War II. In Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948, Frank Kofsky described the aircraft industry as spiraling into red ink after the end of the war and on the verge of bankruptcy when it was rescued by the Cold War (and more specifically Truman’s heavy bomber program). David Noble, in America by Design, made a convincing case that civilian jumbo jets were only profitable thanks to the government’s heavy bomber contracts; the production runs for the civilian market alone were too small to pay for the complex and expensive machinery. The 747 is essentially a spinoff of military production. The civil aviation system is, many times over, a creature of the State. ---This is a function of flawed epistemology --- Centralized transportation planning fails because knowledge is distributed throughout the market and can never be accumulated under sovereign management. Only markets come to grips with the reality of how aggregate knowledge functions.Hayek 1945 (Friedrich A, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, American Economic Review, Volume 35, issue 4, pgs 519-530, http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html) SWOAP Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active coöperation. We need to remember only how much we have to learn in any occupation after we have completed our theoretical training, how big a part of our working life we spend learning particular jobs, and how valuable an asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions, and of special circumstances. To know of and put to use a machine not fully employed, or somebody's skill which could be better utilized, or to be aware of a surplus stock which can be drawn upon during an interruption of supplies, is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques. And the shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp-steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others. It is a curious fact that this sort of knowledge should today be generally regarded with a kind of contempt and that anyone who by such knowledge gains an advantage over somebody better equipped with theoretical or technical knowledge is thought to have acted almost disreputably. To gain an advantage from better knowledge of facilities of communication or transport is sometimes regarded as almost dishonest, although it is quite as important that society make use of the best opportunities in this respect as in using the latest scientific discoveries. This prejudice has in a considerable measure affected the attitude toward commerce in general compared with that toward production. Even economists who regard themselves as definitely immune to the crude materialist fallacies of the past constantly commit the same mistake where activities directed toward the acquisition of such practical knowledge are concerned—apparently because in their scheme of things all such knowledge is supposed to be "given." The common idea now seems to be that all such knowledge should as a matter of course be readily at the command of everybody, and the reproach of irrationality leveled against the existing economic order is frequently based on the fact that it is not so available. This view disregards the fact that the method by which such knowledge can be made as widely available as possible is precisely the problem to which we have to find an answer. 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